As you heard last week, I just came back from visiting Bangladesh and the mission there. Bangladesh is a beautiful country, with many rivers teeming with fish, and diverse peoples and cultures. I have never eaten such an amount of rice and fish curry in my entire life. As the joke goes in Bangladesh, “Rice and curry in the morning, and curry and rice in the evening.” That is how they change their diet.
What particularly caught my eye are the people. There are people that live in the lowlands, and there are people that live high up in the hills. There are tall people, and there are short people. There are light-skinned people, and there are dark-skinned people. There are Muslims, and there are Christians and Hindus. In Bangladesh, people come in all sorts of shades, but they tend to get along well.
In other contexts, such differences would be a trigger for polarization. The differences would be exploited to create divisions in the country. The tall people would be turned against the short people. The dark-skinned would be turned against the light-skinned. The people of the mountains would be turned against those who live in the lowlands. The fire of division would be stoked by the question – “Who is better than the other? Tall or short people? Mountain people or lowlands people? Dark or light-skinned? Who is better than the other?”
Today, in our first reading, we have heard that everything that God created was good and beautiful and He blessed it. Nothing is less, nothing is junk. All have value and dignity, and therefore deserve respect. The opinion of God about who we are and the value he attaches to each person should carry some weight and mean something. The Evil One fogs our thinking, our attitudes, and our perception of others so that we no longer see them the way God sees them.
We are living in an age where divisions are left, right, and center. We attach value to some people, and we dismiss others. We honor people with certain gifts, certain levels of education, or people with certain bank statements, and ignore others. It shouldn’t be like that. The Lord tells us that everything He created was good and He blessed it.
In this Mass, we pray for the healing of all those who feel less, people who do not feel valued and respected, especially in our families. May the Word of God about who they are mean something to them.
We pray in this Mass that the Lord helps us, with His grace, to see what He sees and value what He values.
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